GIS-based Infrastructure Requirement Analysis for an Electric Vertical Take-off and Landing Vehicle-based Transportation System

The number of inhabitants in cities have been increasing and the settlements are growing dispersedly in many regions worldwide. Helped by the invention of cheap, carbon-intensive transport modes, people tend to live in the periphery area, within manageable distance to the city centers. The term “rush hour” embodies commuting culture between low density peripheral areas and high-density city centers. The accessibility from the city center and other important destinations, such as airport, entertainment facilities, and higher education facilities, reduce as the distance between the most outer peripheries settlements to the city center and other important destinations escalate and therefore adding travel time. As everyone has their own limitation of travel budget, in terms of travel cost and travel time, the growing size of cities and their peripheries appear as a problem for its inhabitants. On the other side, to cope with an increase in travel time, researchers, engineers, and scientists are putting efforts to establish new concepts of commuting and travelling. Despite the increasing travel choices as a result from urban policies that favor to urbanization and agglomeration, traffic congestion still increased. Over the past 50 years, traffic congestion has increased significantly within metropolitan areas (Mondschein and Taylor, 2017). Even if the city wants to expand existing networks, they would have to invest an immense amount of taxpayers’ money. The burgeoning advancement of aviation technologies makes the aviation manufacturers able to build rapid, less noisy, and more environmentally-friendly Vertical Take-off and Landing (VTOL) vehicle. From major aviation manufacturers to slim-structured new start-ups are now competing on this new futuristic urban transport mode (Vascik and Hansman, 2017). Uber, as a major On-Demand Mobility (ODM) provider worldwide, also nurtures the progress of this transport mode as it released its Uber Elevate white paper and held an international summit about the future of Urban Air Mobility (UAM) topic. Operating the futuristic VTOL vehicle in an ODM concept makes the conceptual UAM costs similar to surface ODM service for the same travelled kilometers, yet might provide faster travel time (Uber Elevate, 2016). Although it looks promising, the conceptual urban air transport mode, the so called ODM Aviation, is not deliberately developed and designed to reduce traffic congestion and loosen up cramped public transport, but rather to provide high accessibility for broaden settlement inhabitants within metropolitan area, as well as providing better mobility service for disable people. Not only aircraft manufacturers but also startups, technology companies, and car manufacturers are contesting in VTOL development race. Since most of them are coming with their own concepts and ideas of what a VTOL will be manufactured, this thesis will only be considering particular VTOL vehicle type called electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL) vehicle. The development of eVTOL vehicle began when drone invented. The way drone take-off and landing reflected the potential to develop aerial vehicle further. Alike drone, the usage of distributed electric propulsion in eVTOL vehicle brings a lot of advantages, for instance reduced energy cost and reduced maintenance hours (Duffy, Wakayama and Hupp, 2017). Regarding community acceptance, which noise annoyance plays an important role, eVTOL, such as CityAirbus (Airbus, 2017), Volocopter (e-volo GmbH, 2017) and Lilium Jet (Lilium, 2017), claimed emitting low acoustic footprint.